Tuesday, July 25, 2017

For the past couple of years, I've been giving baby formula a ride. Once every month or two, I drive it from my pediatrician's office to the local family homeless shelter. The companies that make formula send it to pediatricians everywhere in the hopes that they'll give it away to their patients, who will like their products and start to buy them. The practice we go to is large and as a result, they get sent a lot of formula and they often end up with too much.

It drove the staff crazy because sometimes they literally couldn't give it away. Once they had to throw it out because they lost track of the expiration date. That spurred one of the (amazing) nurses to ask me if I still helped with homeless families and if so, would I take several cases of formula over there for her. I was like YOU BETCHA LADY, THIS STUFF IS EXPENSIVE. GIDDY UP. So now whenever they have too much baby formula, they call me and I come pick it up.

Today I got to drive 17 cases and that was pretty awesome so I decided to tell you about it. Not to be annoying like - oooh look what I did, I'm so fancy and helpful - but because maybe you also go to a big pediatric practice where you live and they have extra formula and you want to give it a ride. Or maybe you volunteer someplace with hungry families and you read this and thought - Hey! I could maybe get them some much-needed free stuff!

Sending hugs & extra air conditioning (because it is too hot to function in Virginia),
J

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Monday, July 17, 2017

On May 22nd, my 30 year old brother died unexpectedly. It was a pulmonary embolism.

For almost a year preceeding his death, he'd been in crisis due to mental health and addiction problems. On the day he died, we thought we stood a chance of getting him back, but of course now we'll never know how his life might have turned out.

His memorial service was yesterday. My sister and I are really close and we got each other through it. This has been dark, messy, dirty grief - the kind you don't even know how to talk about.

After the memorial, we drove off as fast as we could to a secret beach on Deer Isle, Maine and we dove into the freezing cold water. We jokingly referred to it as a ritual cleansing. The water was so cold that it hurt to go under. But I made myself do it and when I came out, I felt wide awake. My skin tingled and my lungs filled with air and my toes were deep in sea weed and I looked up at the sun. Some mist was rising off the water and we watched the wind blow it out to sea.

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Friday, July 14, 2017

I recently listened to a podcast about space junk, the man-made debris floating around in Earth’s orbit. It discussed how one Cold War-era rocket booster over time may break into 100 smaller pieces of debris, which eventually break into thousands of tiny bits of space junk. It all spins around the planet, occasionally crashing into things, which create exponentially more and smaller debris.

All these little pieces are not gently floating around us in a Hollywood version of zero gravity. They’re moving at incredibly high speed. Millions of tiny pieces of shrapnel, which we know will inevitably cause damage to the satellites and the things in our orbit that we view as important and useful. Like HBO.